Herr Blank's Teacher Page

In Synchronous Society three realities have been discussed, which occur simultaneously and make up our world of action. These are others, things and space. This is not to say that the reader should immediately measure his own reality from these three. It is better to see how one speaks about reality at all - whether it comprises three, eight, thirteen, 400 or a million parts.

Reality does not disintegrate into these three, but simply is all the time. To humans the easiest reduction is the threefold. Reality as threefold has to both singular and plural: singular as concept (1) and plural as structure (2). Reality cannot only be perceived by life. Not that you can still see reality as from the dead, but besides being perceived by man, animal, plant and thing, reality can also be perceived by itself (3). Perception is also an action: by observing you make yourself present. So too is a stone that feels the water of the ocean press on itself. He makes himself present by pressing back. Because I can't see how there is a difference between perceiving and acting in a stone, I don't have to do that for myself either.

If my attention is somewhere, then I am there. To be clear to the reader I mean that every reality, including that of reading, can be seen as part of a system. By this I don't mean a system that expands over time with diagrams and labels, but rather a system that occurs when one would look for it. This book does not propose graphs that need to be analysed afterwards, but tends towards an insight into everyday practice, with its beautiful and less beautiful things. At the same time, this feeling can be translated into all kinds of scientific movements, and it is unimaginable in any case: a science in which it is no longer about the feeling but about the truth. As if truth is even possible without feeling. What feeling? Dark feelings, however, often feel but whether they really should be seen as true, is the question. If someone watches a film and surrenders to the delusion of the heroic (depending on which film), that gives expression to his desire to make the false, while it never comes true. At least, if you would ask that person about it.

Therefore, what is true should never be part of a discussion within a scientific discipline: authenticity (publishing, presenting, dragging in grants) always wins out over truth, because an incited or transformed authenticity automatically leads to the desired control possibilities. The one in control is also the one who determines authenticity. But then that control is very specific and no longer wants to get rid of itself, becomes addicted to itself. Control is then only with the controlling, while the attentive outsider can see that overarching forms of control are also possible. By control I mean nothing more than being able to hold and move, turning a newspaper, so that you come into a state of reading articles. You clearly bring about this reality by means of an automated action system in which you are at the controls. This control is not unconscious, but about 12% of the time it is conscious. Because we only think in terms of conscious/unconscious, we are not able to know what this means. That control is there all the time and we know it, but also not because our brain is not sensitive to degrees of consciousness, let alone to expansion.

Expansion of consciousness now often ends up in the middle of the conversation in which you recognize that you still do not fully understand 'it'. Fortunately there are still a few weeks before the course ends, because if you had stopped now you would not have understood. The narrowing of consciousness that occurs when people talk about consciousness is too bad to pass by. Precisely the attention for the constantly passing is gone, especially the attention for possibilities, openness is blurred in the murmur of the latest scientific breakthroughs about 'getting better'.

The everyday experience is destroyed in the strong urge to always be 'now'. Now there is nothing, while 'being' seems everything. Wouldn't you, however, rather just 'be' instead of 'be now'? I don't know exactly how everyone explains that, but the 'now' as a contrast between past and future, the prevailing view of time, is only at the service of this past or that future. It puts forward, and doesn't mind being booked as an assistant, but being the referee it can never participate in the game himself. That is, it cannot have given that assistant. Who was it then?

Truth: there is no assistant, it is a dream.

Truth: the assistant was there and not, because you experienced the dream. If we do go for truth, then I must now speak of a 'now' of reality, which is so true that the assistant will be.

The problem of reference (individual/collective, future/past, self/other) and the problem of encoding (true/false, etc) can, following this argument, now be accounted for by the differentiation between three and eight. These can now be seen as interspersed; within the toroidal loop of the eight stages (whereby 0=8), the three levels are operational. This problem of differentiating between reference and encoding had been addressed by Luhmann as becoming increasingly difficult in modern science. Media herald the past. They have done so for as long as they are around. Technology has a ‘future’ connotation to it, but because 99% of traffic contains the ‘past’ or a narrative or version of it, we have to be careful not to live in the past and mistake it for now or later.

Presence of Media in Classrooms

On Monday I will hold a presentation on the benefits of having on-hand media for the language-learning high school student. On-hand, because they are not hidden any longer, as they were last year, usually in the form of smart phones. Now, they are visible and useful, but to what degree exactly?

To answer this broad question I suggest taking an approach that covers the most important aspects of our life: time, place and people. Time learning the target language is spent outside of the classroom, while classroom time might be spent on crunching a lot of work into sparse minutes. Classroom activities had been assisted by overhead and then projectors, but now are individualized since students use their own device on which they also check emails and do other personal stuff. The Chromebook takes over the place of learning to an unforeseen degree (an estimated 40% and over) of a student’s average class period attention. People are more often inside the Chromebook than surrounding a student physically. The sheer number of people inside the Chromebook makes it easy to discard the 20-some students physically present.

Let’s look a bit closer, though. What happens in the student’s head? What happens to his thoughts? Perhaps it is safe to say that students will either prioritize social life (parents, friends, he-said-she-said, sports, dates, parties, etc.) or stuff (games, sports, cars, house, degrees, money in general, etc.). There are those who prioritize storytelling but usually high-schoolers are too young to have developed a strong sense of this more ephemeral aspect.

Once a student reaches his or her senior year, it will be easier to reflect on what they have learned in high school so far. They will then discover that they have spent too much time on either thinking about social life, or about stuff. We call this reflection important, because it takes anyone toward the storytelling phase: what is my life going to look like, and more importantly, is the answer to that still fully under my control? From that point on the student will find amazement in any of the eight grand societal systems.

Wait, but how is this important for our initial question, does on-hand technology enhance learning for language learners in high school? Well, the answer can now be easily given: as long as a student is helped in his process of self-reflection, it will benefit him or her. I think it is entirely possible that students will start to reflect on their life/career purpose earlier on, and therefore can attain a deeper kind of reflection. If such reflection does not take place, and the hand-on device becomes the distraction everyone fears it will be, the results may be devastating. One thing is clear: if a student has to figure this out on his own, he will fail. He has to be guided.

For this reason I wrote the book 138: Shortcut To Beyond, which explains why such a guide is so important, and views the entrance of a different role of technology from an autobiographical (better: autoethographic) viewpoint. The book lays down a simple overview of society, carefully carves out its limits, and its freedom within those limits. That approach will last longer than the haphazard one, where single apps are shown to be beneficial for the opportunities they provide.

Case in point: Flipgrid. Flipgrid has students respond to a prompt through video. Students and teacher can then provide feedback through video and writing. It can be said to create community instantly, since a single teacher prompt has students watch at least 10 other students’ entries and provide feedback to 2, while receiving feedback from at least 1 other student. It does not create new ways of expression although it certainly is new to students who don’t like their face in video. Exposure to target language is increased by viewing other students’ videos. However, other than the teacher speaking near-native in the prompt, there is no exposure to native or authentic language. It is also very laborious for a teacher to provide feedback to every student separately, depending on the limitations for student output built into the prompt (i.e. if the output is simple, it would be less laborious to listen to each student’s entry). The best thing is that student have fun adding funny accessories to their screen capture of the video. This fun is related to students being able to ‘dress up in drag’ and being provided with options for stylization, i.e. being someone else for a while. This part is important since any platform that revolves around profiles has largely been successful for this same option.

A clear link is establish between this chapter (Mastering ESL/EFL Methods, chapter I) and the last one (Strategies for teaching English learners, chapter 10) in this workshop, when the authors emphasize that "educators must be fully aware of the influence that a CLD student's biography, especially his or her culture, has on his or her preferred learning processes, language use, and performance potential in the classroom". Central to the book (it now turns out) stand the Prism Model with its four dimensions. After some extra reading I am starting to see how important this model has become for teacher who want to do right to CLD students by also minding the cognitive development in L1 of the child. I would now consider the cognitive dimension the more central one, while the other three are surrounding ones. Having this model as a thoroughly cognitive one now makes much more sense to me. The social and cultural processes cannot be central since cognitive development could happen regardless of which exact social and cultural processes. This latter term could better be called 'L1+L2 social and cultural development' since this development involves a specific adaptation to the new environment a CLD student operates (develops) in. I would like to hear what other students think of this proposed change to the model.

The chapter further neatly hammers out the facets of social acculturation, specified for schooling. It would furthermore be very interesting to relate these facets more clearly to stage of linguistic and academic development.

Age of Universe (Big Bang/Urknall). Perhaps the most important discovery of the Planck observatory was the reception of microwave radiation. The device received light from only 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Using this data we now know that the universe itself is 13.8 billion years old, plus or minus 0.05 billion years – that is more than 100 million years older than was always assumed.